The Fifth Avenue Artists Society Read Online Free PDF

Franklin leaned toward me, looping his arm around my shoulders. I lifted my hand to take his. Our parents told us he’d reached for me like this only moments after we were born and that my hand had lifted to rest on his. It made sense. Everything else disappeared when we embraced this way and all we saw were each other. Frank’s forehead met mine. “No one,” he whispered. “Do you understand me, Gin? We will always, always rise stronger.”

Chapter Three
The Loftin House
BRONX, NEW YORK
    C harlie came by my house the following day, and the day after that, and the day after that. Every day for two weeks and two days. He came at different times, but always looked the same—fingers tangled in his brown curls, eyes darting across the upstairs windows. I wanted so badly to go to him, to hear him say that he’d made a mistake and wanted me, but there was no guarantee of that dream and I wouldn’t subject my shattered heart to a conversation to the contrary. Instead, I’d watch him come up the walk every day, flattening myself on the cushion of the window seat when he got close enough to see me. Alevia had fabricated an excuse the first time—that I was ill and resting. The rest of my family had thankfully followed suit.
    I’d barely moved since waking the morning after the party. But it wasn’t only sadness that paralyzed me; it was also inspiration. I wanted, needed, to write. From sunup to sundown, words poured from my mind. I wrote until my fingers could barely move from their clutch on the pencil and my brain began to confuse sentences. I wrote twelve columns for the Bronx Review , I wrote about my family, and when I couldn’t put it off any longer, I began to write about Charlie. It started because I knew someday I’d forget what it felt like to be in love, to have him in my life—the comfort that came with his friendship. I could already feel his absence, and unable to bear it, I wrote down every daydream, all the things I’d always hoped for our future. By the time I was done, I’d written a book—about imagined adventures overseas, a pleasant domestic life surrounded by family and art, and finally, a parting at death that made me ache.
    I stared at the words “The End” as if they were an inscription on a gravestone—an irreversible statement that at last forced me into the real world to face the truth of his betrayal. I ached for the words I’d written to come alive, to transform this bleak reality, but they never would. Charlie, my perfect match, had deserted me. Without him my dreams of love and marriage and children and art could never be. No one else had the same mix of passions and I wouldn’t resign myself to someone lesser for the sake of companionship.
    I set my notebook down and thumbed through the latest Scribner’s Magazine. My fingers paused on a story from Octave Thanet—otherwise known as Alice French—titled Stories of a Western Town. She was criticized in some circles for hiding her identity, for choosing to remain a spinster, but she’d always been an inspiration to me, a woman who’d successfully broken through the iron gates of masculinity to grace the pages of the country’s finest literary magazines. Charlie had known of my admiration, and after my fifth rejection from the Bronx Review— the day after the Review hired him for his drawings—he dragged me down to the library. Though I’d always been resilient, this time I’d thought to give up writing. It seemed impossible that someone could seepast my gender. Charlie had made me sit at reception while he disappeared into the bowels of the library, returning with copies of Thanet’s stories, The Bishop’s Vagabond , Knitters in the Sun, and We All. He’d forced me to read them, sitting silently beside me until my defeat began to crumble.
    I stood from the window seat and closed the magazine. There was no use